Wafer dicing is a process by which die are separated from a wafer of semiconductor material following the processing of the wafer. The dicing process may be accomplished by scribing and breaking the wafer. This can be done by sawing or laser cutting.
Conventional mechanical sawing process needs a wide sawing street, which leads to less silicon area for active devices. Additionally, the mechanical sawing is confronted with damage due to chipping problems due to decreased wafer thickness and increase of back side metallization ratio. Quality and reliability issues are also a detractor.
Laser dicing needs a wider kerf and causes a ridge, which leads also to breakage in back end processing. Stealth dicing changes crystal structure to amorphous silicon, leads to unknown structures in the kerf. Also, in plasma dicing, no integration exists however for plasma diced dies in bulk and plasma diced dies without back side metallization.
During plasma dicing, etching may be performed. During an etch step, part of the wafer is protected from the etchant by a “masking” material which resists etching. In some cases, the masking material is a photoresist which has been patterned using photolithography. Other situations require a more durable mask, such as silicon nitride.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have a method, system, and computer program product that addresses one or more of the issues discussed above.